From Chapter Two:
The Rise of Expressive Divorce

LIKE the era of vulgar divorce, the new divorce era began in a period of economic ebullience and restlessness and at a time when women were gaining new freedoms and opportunities in the world of work and public life. Both factors figured prominently in the growing disposition to divorce. But two features defined this new era of divorce as truly revolutionary. The first was that the nation's most dramatic and sustained divorce "high" was unaccompanied by any sense of crisis. Earlier in the nation's history, even when the rate of divorce was negligible by contemporary standards, Americans fretted over the problem of broken homes; after the mid-1960s, as divorce swept across the social landscape, Americans showed remarkably little concern about its impact or spread. The old fears about the social havoc caused by unchecked divorce, the concerns about the damaging impact of divorce on children, the anxieties about freedom tipping into license, all but vanished. After the mid-1960s, divorce ceased to be defined as a problem.

Second, in the last third of the century divorce was harnessed to new ambitions
and purposes. Underlying the growing disposition to divorce was an entirely new
conception of the nature and purpose of divorce itself. The transformation in
the idea of divorce occurred as the result of an inner revolution that took
place among postwar Americans. This revolution created a new way of thinking
and talking about divorce. It also created a new rationale for divorce as an
expressive as well as a legal freedom.

In the postwar period, the nation experienced two decades of steady and
widespread economic growth. The rise in the standard of living was unparalleled
in American experience, as breadwinners' rising wages sustained homemakers'
spiraling consumption. For postwar American families it was a sweetheart deal. Earning and spending advanced hand in hand, creating what seemed like an economically ordained union between the separate spheres of work and family life.

The experience of sustained material affluence served to unleash a sense of
psychological affluence. Americans began to feel economically invulnerable, and
the widespread optimism about economic prospects encouraged a more expansive
outlook about individual opportunities in noneconomic spheres of life. The
social analyst Daniel Yankelovich observes that the experience of affluence
began to cut into the American psyche in the late 1960s; it was then that
people began to believe that the economic good times would continue
indefinitely and that they could begin to "live for today and for their own
self-satisfaction."

According to the authors of The Inner American, a social-scientific
study of the emotional well-being of postwar Americans, this shift represented
nothing less than a "psychological revolution." In the period between 1957 and
1976 Americans began to look at the world and themselves in a new way. They
turned their attention toward the inner world of self. The link between
economic well-being and personal happiness weakened; people were less likely to
cite economic reasons as the cause of unhappiness than they had been twenty
years earlier. Instead, their sense of individual well-being became more
dependent on the richness of their emotional lives, the depth and quality of
feelings, and the variety of opportunities for self-expression.

The psychological revolution contributed to a change in conceptions of what
made for a good and successful life. Middle-class ambitions shifted from
climbing the economic ladder to moving up the happiness scale. It was
psychological mobility -- a boost in emotional and expressive satisfactions, a
chance to be a more fulfilled person -- rather than economic mobility that
engaged American energies and appetites from the 1970s on.

Increasingly Americans tended to view happiness as a subjective feeling rather
than a set of objective economic or social conditions. Similarly, they
displayed a growing readiness to define "unhappiness" as psychological rather
than situational in nature, caused by a decline in personal satisfaction rather
than a shift in personal or social fortunes. Americans were also more willing
to talk about their personal problems and to seek help from mental health
professionals rather than from doctors and clergy, the professional help givers
whose advice had been most commonly sought in the 1950s. And as interest in the
inner life increased, so too did its apparent richness. The geography of the
inner life turned out to be far more complex, intricate, and differentiated
than once imagined. Upon closer investigation, it also turned out to be more
difficult to negotiate solo, without the assistance of an expert guide.